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The title of this book and the reputation of its editors made me eager to review it. What the editors have set out to do, they have done well and neatly. They have collected fifty-one papers by different authors, each paper on a different aspect of psychopharmacology. The papers are brief, well written, well illustrated, and rigidly 'scientific'. However, by including as many diverse points of view as possible, the editors scatter their shots. The book fails, not because it does not represent well the current status of psychopharmacologic research but because it does just that, and no more. The psychoanalyst will find little of interest in the book.
Psychoanalytic theory is often charged with the fault of not lending itself to testing and validation. The techniques for examining effects of drugs presented in this book are operational and testable. But to the clinician they are naïve and removed from the fundamental, biologic variables of human behavior. Rating scales, conditioned reflexes, automatic responses, questionnaires cannot come to grips with basic pathogenic forces and their derivatives. As one might expect, the results are scattered, unsystematic, unpredictable, and useless for clinical application.
This reviewer believes that only the clinical psychoanalyst who is at home with psychoanalytic theory and who has psychoanalyzed patients while they are under the influence of the newer drugs is in a position to work out the specific effects of these chemical agents on the psychic economy. In this book of over 650 pages, including a name index fifteen pages long, there are but two references to Freud: one pointing out that psychoanalytic constructs require